At present, Instant Messaging (IM) applications have been widely used in people's life.
In general, after logging in to an IM application through a local user account and a password, a local user may query for stored accounts of other users (hereinafter the other users are referred to as remote users, and the accounts of the other users are referred to as remote user accounts) in an address book of the IM application, or may request a query for remote user accounts from a server. Then, it is feasible to enter a page for conducting instant messaging with the remote users by clicking the queried remote user accounts.
In conventional techniques, the IM application may store all instant messaging messages that have been sent and received between a local user account and each remote user account respectively as one local session corresponding to the each remote user account, and use the local sessions to form a local session list (each local session respectively serves as one line of the local session list) to be displayed in the IM application. It is feasible to, by clicking any local session, open a page that is used when instant messaging is conducted with the corresponding remote user, and then continue to conduct instant messaging with the remote user on the page. As shown in FIG. 1, the left side is a local session list which includes a total of eight local sessions respectively corresponding to remote user accounts 1 to 8, and the right side is a page displayed after a local session corresponding to the remote user account 1 is clicked and opened.
In actual applications, remote users that a local user often contacts in the IM application are usually a few particular objects, such as the spouse, parents, close friends and so on. For most ordinary friends in the address book, the local user may contact them only occasionally. In this case, although a lot of local sessions may be contained in a local session list, what the local user usually clicks are only a few local sessions (hereinafter referred as particular sessions) corresponding to the particular objects. As the particular sessions may be intermingled in a great number of other local sessions in the local session list and positions of the particular sessions in the local session list may also frequently change, it is not convenient for the local user to look for the particular sessions.